We have another firearms law found unconstitutional in the wake of Bruen, but this one has a significant difference.
On Friday, January 12th, U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle ruled that a United States law prohibiting people from possessing firearms while inside of a post office goes against their constitutional rights.
According to Fox News, Judge Mizelle, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, cited a 2022 landmark United States Supreme Court decision that expanded gun rights when she dismissed part of an indictment charging a postal worker with illegally possessing a gun in a federal facility.
That landmark case, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, recognized a person’s right to carry a handgun in public for self-defense and established a new test for assessing firearms restrictions, noting it must be “consistent with this nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”
The indictment against the postal worker, Emmanuel Ayala, was brought forth because of the Smith & Wesson 9mm gun that he kept in a fanny pack with his concealed carry permit. Ayala framed his case around the Bruen decision, arguing that the prohibition against guns in a federal postal facility is “unconstitutional” as applied to him because the “historical record does not support a law banning firearms in post offices.”
Mizelle noted that the United States’ response to Ayala’s claim was that the “Second Amendment allows it to punish the bearing of arms inside any government building.” The United States specifically deemed a post office as a “sensitive place,” claiming that such a designation means the government can “ban the carrying of firearms while not violating an individual’s Second Amendment rights” and is “consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”
Mizelle rejected that claim, writing, “[Bruen] requires the United States to present historical support for § 930(a)’s application to Ayala, which it fails to do. Post offices have existed since the founding, as have threats to the safety of postal workers and the public entering those locations. Yet the historical record yields no ‘distinctly similar historical regulation addressing’ those safety problems by regulating firearms in post offices … Bruen deems this absence strong evidence of the statute’s unconstitutionality.”
Mizelle sided with Ayala is his claim that the law prohibiting guns in a federal postal facility was unconstitutional, writing, “I dismiss the § 930(a) charge because it violates Ayala’s Second Amendment right to bear arms.”
Snip.
In her decision, Mizelle stated that federal law did not ban guns in government buildings until 1964 and in post offices until 1972. She said there is no historical practice dating back to the 1700s that justifies the ban. The judge said allowing the federal government to restrict visitors from bringing guns into government facilities would allow it to “abridge the right to bear arms by regulating it into practical non-existence.
The big difference here is that previous anti-gun laws overturned in the wake of Bruen have been state laws, but this one is a federal law. Perhaps one slipped by while I wasn’t looking, but I believe that this is the first federal law overturned in the wake of Bruen.
Decision by decision, the Second Amendment is slowly being restored to its proper place in American jurisprudence.
Tags: Emmanuel Ayala, Guns, Kathryn Kimball Mizelle, New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, Postal Service, Regulation
The deference given precedent has always disturbed me in our legal system. I honestly don’t care WTF they were doing in 1790; conditions were different, and the issues ought to be decided on what works today, not what they did 250 years ago.
The entire legal system reminds me of one of those crufty ancient computer programs that started out on an equally ancient piece of hardware, and which has been ported over to new equipment a dozen or more times, with more and more layers of BS duct-taped over the top of it. At some point, you are going to have to go back and rip everything out and start over… With something that works.
Traditions and all are great, but… In a legal system? Do we really want to be deciding things based on what some jurist in the 18th Century thought about a subject that has changed immensely since then? The laws about libel are a good example… Base principles are decent, but the decisions made based on precedent overlook all the technological changes made since. In 1790, you could libel a guy in your local community with a printing press; today? You can libel the poor bastard around the world in an instant, using a plethora of tools. The customary precedents don’t properly address a lot of the changes that have come in, over the years…
The counterpoint to this is Gall’s Law: “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.” You see this in software all the time, where an attempt to rewrite a crufty old system from the ground up frequently ends in failure.
The Constitution works because the base ideas are so clearly stated, and it doesn’t attempt to cover every use case at the federal level.
And as far as a complete rewrite without duct tape, that’s what the Social Justice sorts are trying to replace it with. And their system is a dystopian nightmare that doesn’t work.
The funny thing is, USPS has always been shipping firearms. Their position has always been “if it’s in a box with a postage stamp on it, it’s not a gun, it’s mail”.
“The deference given precedent has always disturbed me in our legal system. I honestly don’t care WTF they were doing in 1790; conditions were different, and the issues ought to be decided on what works today, not what they did 250 years ago.”
The absence of precedence (and its constraints on rulers) made the Revolutionary French, Soviet, and Red Chinese legal systems envies of the entire world.
Do note that the deference to precedence is precisely how we got a lot of the bad firearms law we have. The basic principle of the 2nd Amendment is clear and unambiguous. The arseholes arguing over that which was supposedly done back in the 18th Century are a huge part of the problem.
The “precedents” you want hallowed and respected also gave us crap like the Dred Scott decision, and a myriad of other bad legal “principles”, which are more often just that which the current lot of assholes think expedient.
I’m not a big one for any of this shit. The Bill of Rights is very clear on a lot of issues, but the power-hungry control freaks in government have been nibbling away at that document for generations now. You put “precedence” at the top of your list for how we “interpret” that list of inalienable rights, then what? “Oh, we used to do this, so now we can do that…”
F*ck “precedent”. Basic principles of the law ought to be the sole criteria.
“The funny thing is, USPS has always been shipping firearms. Their position has always been “if it’s in a box with a postage stamp on it, it’s not a gun, it’s mail”.”
The 1927 Miller Act (18 U.S. Code § 1715) prohibited mailing “pistols, revolvers, and other firearms capable of being concealed on the person…”, except to manufacturers, or by/to government officials.
The Miller Act was the first federal gun control law and the cited basis for the prohibition of firearms on USPS property.
To my utter and absolute astonishment, I find myself in agreement with 10×25.
“[C]onditions were different, and the issues ought to be decided on what works today, not what they did 250 years ago.”
It is time for Kirk to reexamine the Founder’s wisdom, i.e., that we can only proceed based on what we have learned from the past.
Absent historical insight, there is no way to understand where we are, how we got here and what the future may hold. The French Revolution rejected the lessons of history in an abortive attempt to remake the world anew.
The US Constitution is an attempt to resist the unmoored pragmatism of the Jacobins. “We must strike out in all directions to find the way forward” became the regicide’s creed.
We are poised on the precipice of revolutionary upheaval. Let us show good judgement and meekly embrace the ancient values our forebears defended.
The point all of you are missing, which is right out there in the open, is the incrementalist manner in which they’ve been using and abusing “precedent” in order to strip rights away.
It started with “reasonable” decisions made expediently; it ends with your rights nibbled away.
The Bill of Rights says what it says; the courts have, without recourse to the consent of the people governed by that Constitution, chosen to gradually abrogate those rights away.
Do note the “precedents” established have enabled things like the government choosing to rob you blind, figuratively and literally: Where is the constitutional basis for either civil forfeiture or sovereign immunity? Both of those things exist solely because of the idea of precedent; some crooked judge decided that cops, politicians, and other figures should be immune from any recourse by their victims, and here we are with both things effectively made law by judges.
That was never how it was supposed to work, with judicial tyranny having no recourse.
Flatly, f*ck “precedent”. It’s a terrible way to decide cases, shoehorning the circumstances of some ancient case into what is being decided today under vastly different conditions.
“Precedent” means that you’re on the hook for that illegitimate bastard your whore of a cheating wife saddled you with, because they didn’t have a means of correctly determining paternity “in the old days”. Today? We have such things; precedent is a straight-jacket that does not take change into account. But, here we are: More deference given to the screaming primitives than modern genetic science.
I’ll defer only to the basic intent of the original law; 200-plus years of bad decisions made expediently by corrupt judges? F*ck that. The Bill of Rights says what it says; I agreed to that when I signed up to support and defend the Constitution. I did not sign up to support and defend “legal” decisions layered on by a couple of hundred years of crooks.
Kirk says:
The deference given precedent has always disturbed me in our legal system
…
The point all of you are missing, which is right out there in the open, is the incrementalist manner in which they’ve been using and abusing “precedent” in order to strip rights away.
Except that what you were bitching about in your first post was SCOTUS’s demand that we go back to the original precedents, not the incremental BS that you now claim to oppose.
Has the Left abused our legal system? Yes, yes thy have.
Does that mean we need to get rid of the concept of “legal system”?
Well, it may get to that point. but it’s not there yet.
But that’s where you’re at with you bitching about use of precedent. Because you can’t have a functional legal or political system without it